The newest BSDNow episode talks with Sean Bruno about poudriere and QEMU. He’s using those tools on FreeBSD, but poudriere is useful for building dports on DragonFly, too. The usual news collection is there, too.
Author:
03/03/2015
Book release party in NYC tomorrow night
NYCBUG is having a book release event for “The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System” with George Neville-Neil, one of the authors. It’s happening tomorrow night, at the Stone Creek Bar & Lounge: 140 E 27th St. George Neville-Neil will be talking about DTrace, and there’s copies of the book to buy/win.
03/02/2015
BSDtalk 251: 10 Gigabits per Server
The just-posted BSDTalk 251 is 47 minutes long, and comes from vBSDCon 2013, with three people interviewed about Verisign and FreeBSD.
03/01/2015
Lazy Reading for 2015/03/01
The temperatures climbed up to almost not freezing this week! It feels so warm.
- exa, a modern replacement for ls. I like the website. (via)
- Value of windowing is questioned. (via)
- Good PuTTY defaults for a happy SSH’ing life (via)
- The History of Graphic Design and Computational Form. Long, with many excellent examples. (via)
- Stirring Tea. (via)
- What Blogging Has Become. Think of this site. (via)
- All My Blogs Are Dead. Why I self-host whenever possible. (via)
- Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana. Wrong, in 1995. (via)
- Futures of Text. (via)
- The Sierpinski triangle page to end most Sierpinski triangle pages. (via, including the link text)
- GPG and Me (via many places)
- Trinity, KDE3 continued.
- MATE, Gnome2 continued.
- What laptop to [sic] you use?
- “…then came Cisco, and the rest is history”: a ‘history friendly’ model of the Local Area Networking industry. Why there’s so many “Cisco shops”. (PDF, via)
- Chinese DNS Poisoning. It’s China, which means Chinese Government DNS Poisoning. (more) (via)
- How to be an open source gardener. Excellent, excellent advice. (via)
Your unrelated video link of the week: The Chemistry of Cookies.
02/28/2015
In Other BSDs for 2015/02/28
Well, this week just sort of took off for BSD links.
- FreeBSD on the POWER8: It’s alive! (via)
- Freenas and ESXI-Vmware snapshots
- PHP 5.3 and Ruby 1.8.7 appear to be on the way out of pkgsrc.
- PC-BSD gains a sort of automatic TOR-mode.
- OpenBSD Foundation 2014/2015 newsletter.
- OpenBSD 5.7 on Minnowboard Max.
- Aww, no more punchcard utilities.
- FreeBSD has some upgrades around tape utilities.
- Installworld… installcloud?
- “If you work for a lottery and you’re using random(3) to select the winning numbers, please let me know.“
- uefisign(8), a UEFI Secure Boot signing utility.
- pkg in pkgsrc. (via)
- “How can I crate a bootable BSD via GNU/Linux?“
- DiscoverBSD for 2015/02/23.
- ZFS, and How to Make a Foot Cannon.
- A week of pkgsrc #7.
- BSDCan proposals and rejections.
- NetBSD on IBM’s SoftLayer and Microsoft’s Azure and more
A late update: NYCBUG’s upcoming meetings and presentations, with the next one on March 4th, this week. If you have a local BSD user group, I would like to know about it!
02/27/2015
Got Nagios? Got Hammer?
If you’re monitoring your DragonFly systems with Nagios, here’s a way to check the health of your Hammer mirror-streams. Thanks, Mike!
02/26/2015
BSDNow 078: From the Foundation (Part 2)
BSDNow 078 is up with more BSD Foundation interviews. It’s not a sequel, but a switch: the last one was with a FreeBSD Foundation member, and this week’s episode is with Ken Westerback of the OpenBSD Foundation. There’s the normal added news, too, with a description of what’s coming at BSDCan 2015.
Did you upgrade DragonFly on the 25th?
If you are on DragonFly-master and you upgraded during select hours on the 25th of February, you may have been bit by a makefile error. The fix, as listed in that link, is simple:
cp /usr/src/share/mk/sys.mk /usr/share/mk
If you are not on -master or you did not upgrade in that timeframe: never mind.
02/25/2015
DragonFly GUI resurrected
Michael Neumann has switched out pkgsrc packages for dports packages for building DragonFly with a GUI. There’s no built image to download right now, but I’m optimistic the next release will have it. You can build it now on a DragonFly system using src/nrelease. With all this video work going in lately, it will give us something to show.
02/24/2015
Radeon updates, too
If you’ve been sitting with a Radeon-based video card and wishing you had all the nice updates i915 users are getting, today is your lucky day. Michael Neumann has brought Radeon support equivalent to Linux 3.9 into DragonFly, and he has a 3.10 branch for testing if you feel adventurous.
02/22/2015
Lazy Reading for 2015/02/22
Lots of in-depth reading this week. Put on something warm/drink something warm (especially if you are in the northeast US) and start reading.
- Making a C64/C65 compatible computer in an FPGA. (via)
- Joe Chip’s problem was never his door. (via)
- A Whole New World. (via, via)
- CORE 2015, the magazine from the Computer History Museum. (PDF)
- Warren Ellis on the Apple Watch.
- Understanding Code Forking in Open Source Software, a paper. (via)
- Chart of similar operations with sed and awk. (via)
- A Tale of Two Zippers. (via)
- 10 fancy zsh tricks you may not know… and Six hacks for less(1).
- “Why are there so many goddamn package managers?” (via)
- The Last of the Typewriter Men. (via)
- Where to buy amazing tea online. Maybe a bit pretentious.
- It’s a UNIX system. I know this. (via)
Your unrelated quote of the week:
“If we had Smart Dogs right now, they’d have screens instead of ears, and they wouldn’t be able to bark in a somewhat indecipherable but yet still full of meaning way, they’d just have a whole bunch of notification icons that would come out of their butt and would all be red circles with numbers in them.”
Your unrelated link of the week: Drone over Niagara Falls. That’s about 70 miles from here; I’ve been there many times. That may give you an idea of the snow buildup/cold level here recently.
02/21/2015
In Other BSDs for 2015/02/21
There’s some DragonFly material in here, though I normally confine that to the rest of the week. It’s inextricable from the rest of the links.
- Setting up an OpenBSD mail server. (via)
- FreeBSD-current users, regenerate your keys. (fixed)
- Using OpenBSD and vxlan to overlay remote lans. (via)
- A Prediction: 2020 the year of (PC-)BSD on the desktop. (also)
- “Has Linux lost its way?” (via) (also)
- DiscoverBSD news for 2015/02/16.
- Curious if FreeBSD or any other BSD district would work better on a MacBook pro?
- Which
- Am I taking a realistic route to learning more about internals? (hey, it’s DragonFly!)
- Speaking of which: cross-pollination.
- More cross-pollination, and surprise from me; I didn’t know USB video link worked on any BSD.
- The m0n0wall project has ended.
- The end of ‘games’ as a separate object on FreeBSD.
- Tetris: still changing.
- autonet – simple automatic wifi chooser on OpenBSD.
- pkgsrc binaries as an exit strategy from systemd.
- IPFW now the default firewall (and on) in PC-BSD.
- The updated roadmap to 1.0.0 for Lumina, PC-BSD’s desktop environment, to go with the 0.8.2 release.
- PC-BSD at SCALE.
- s2k15 hackathon report.
02/20/2015
memtemp(4) update
I admit I never thought about it much, but I’ve also never had enough RAM to matter: there’s a memtemp(4) tool that monitors temperature sensors for your system’s memory. Sepherosa Ziehau has updated it on DragonFly to support some newer processor setups.
02/19/2015
Really turning off Sendmail
This bites many people sooner or later: you think you’ve turned sendmail off, but it still gets opened up on your system. The answer: sendmail_enable=”NONE”.
(It should support sendmail_enable=”NOPE”.)
BSDNow 077: Noah’s L2ARC
The 77th episode of BSDNow is up, with a tutorial on making a patch in OpenBSD, an interview of Alex Reece and Matt Ahrens about OpenZFS, and the usual news roundup.
02/18/2015
SSDs and disk wear
Several of the DragonFly machines used for building packages and/or releases have SSDs, and have been vigorously exercising those disks for some time. SSDs are supposed to have a shorter lifetime than spindle-based hard drives. However, Matthew Dillon found that there’s surprisingly little wear on those SSDs. This empiric information was noticed in several places.
02/17/2015
HEADS UP: pkg will eat itself
Well, might rather than will , but I had to make a music reference. There’s a bug in versions of pkg from 1.4.6(ish) to 1.4.11 that can make it accidentally delete itself while updating packages. If this happens to you, there’s an easy fix, as posted to users@:
# cd /usr && make pkg-bootstrap
Once you’re on version 1.4.12+, you’re fine.
02/15/2015
Lazy Reading for 2015/02/15
Being home sick in the middle of the week gave me a head start on all these links.
- Tea – Instead of Coffee. Some cheap purchasing links in the comments.
- The Obfuscated Fibonacci; Or, a Curious Connection in Computation. (via)
- BASIC Computer Games, 1978. I loved this book, and especially the illustrations. (via)
- A comment link from the previous story led me to DiscoRunner.com, a “multi-dialect BASIC interpreter”.
- Brands are not your friends.
- The Classic Super Star Trek Game. (via)
- Modern C, a PDF. (via)
- Learning to love the command line. (via)
- Networks of New York: An Internet Infrastructure Field Guide. (via)
- Stop Playing Monopoly With Your Kids.
- The last twenty years building the web no-one asked for in two wireframes. (via)
- The Realities of Installing iBeacon to Scale. (via)
- osh, the V6 UNIX sh. (via)
- Fractal Flowchart. (via)
- Pterosaur, Vim within Firefox text fields. Not new, but I like the screencast example.
- Has modern Linux lost its way? Another variation on the “Linux is a mess compared to any BSD” argument – not that I’m discounting it. (via)
- Cosma.org’s computer preservation page. (via)
02/14/2015
In Other BSDs for 2015/02/14
Happy Valentine’s Day!
- The OpenBSD Foundation 2015 Fundraising Campaign. (via)
- Anyone tried CloudByte before? (ZFS on FreeBSD).
- DiscoverBSD news for 2015/02/09.
- PC-BSD featured on itwire.com.
- From the OpenBSD s2k15 hackathon: the stack overflow that wasn’t and Authenticated TLS ‘constraints’ in ntpd(8).
- Jazz concert with OpenBSD synths.
- “Help me add FreeBSD/amd64 build support to .NET CoreCLR“.
- “Can you push a BSD OS through the wire/network?” The original poster has never heard of PXEbooting?
- PC-BSD 11.0-CURRENT Images Now Available!
- Speaking of which, PC-BSD now uses OpenNTPD by default.
- An old large-disk anecdote from OpenBSD.
- “world’s first Canadian cross device driver“
- pkgsrc-2014Q4 packages for OS X now available.
- NTP over HTTPS.
- Aww, freebsd/wii.
Your not-BSD BSD link of the week: Badass Space Dragon.
02/13/2015
New committer: Tomohiro Kusumi
Say hello to the newest DragonFly committer: Tomohiro Kusumi. He’s been contributing Hammer patches for some time and appearing on IRC, so it’s easier to just let him make changes directly. Welcome, Tomohiro.
BSDNow 076: Time for a Change
BSDNow 076 interviews Henning Brauer about his work on OpenNTPD, which has recently been converted to a portable version, similar to OpenSSH. (Why? Amplification.) There’s also the normal array of other BSD stories, including DragonFly, yay!
02/11/2015
More gcc 5 details
It’s now possible to build world and kernel on DragonFly using gcc 5, and Matthew Dillon has posted an announcement that describes how. He also separately lists the (small considering the included C++) effect on build time.
Note that gcc 4.7 remains the default compiler.
02/10/2015
“Life with an OpenBSD Laptop” is tonight
If you’re in/near New York City, NYCBUG has a meeting tonight with Issac (.ike) Levy presenting “Life with an OpenBSD Laptop“.
GCC 5 Arrives
John Marino has removed gcc 4.4 in DragonFly, and replaced it with gcc 5.0. Two things to note: gcc 5 does not yet successfully build world, and DragonFly is an officially supported platform for gcc with this release.
02/09/2015
em(4), emx(4) updates
If you have a em(4)/emx(4) card, AKA ‘Intel(R) PRO/1000′, Michael Neumann has an update for you. It’s from Intel’s 7.2.4 release of the code. This is to support the new I218 cards. Initial reports are positive.
02/08/2015
Lazy Reading for 2015/02/08
I’m… not sure what happened this week. I read the same amount of material, went through my RSS feeds, and this is the only stuff that looked linkable. Sorry!
- This Industry Is Still Completely Ridiculous. (via)
- Odd Comments and Strange Doings in Unix. (via)
- .bashrc generator. (via)
- The next Internet is TV. (via)
- Robot Supercut. Kinda clickbaity, but I like the footage. (via)
- GnuPG needed funding, got funding. (via)
02/07/2015
In Other BSDs for 2015/02/07
This week is relatively quiet.
- Raspberry Pi GPU acceleration in NetBSD 7. (via)
- OpenBSD networking on Macbook Pro?
- PC-BSD 10.1.1 is out.
- Is there any RNDIS support in any BSD?
- Ask HN: Laptop for FreeBSD?
- Stuck between OpenBSD and DragonFly BSD (mostly Web and File Server)
- devctl, a new device control utility in FreeBSD.
- FreeBSD has gained a VCHI driver for the Broadcom “VideoCore IV GPU”.
- Things you can remove from FreeBSD.
- PC-BSD gains ‘personacrypt’, for encryption of home directories.
- OpenBSD gained iwm(4), for Intel 7260 wifi.
02/05/2015
BSDNow 075: From the Foundation
BSDNow 075 has an interview with Ed Maste about what the FreeBSD Foundation has been up to, and I’m guessing from the “Part 1″ in the title there’s going to be more information in a subsequent show. There’s also a roundup of various BSD news items — more than usual, I think.
02/04/2015
Many wireless updates
Matthew Dillon brought in some wireless networking updates – the ath(4), iwn(4), and wpi(4) drivers are updated. There’s porting notes if you need them, too. In related news, rum(4) is also improved. The updates apparently benefited DragonFly and FreeBSD at the same time.
02/03/2015
More i915 upgrades
Francois Tigeot has updated the i915 drivers in DragonFly (remember the call for testing) to match what’s in Linux 3.10, which means you should get excellent accelerated video performance on most any recent Intel video chipset, on DragonFly.
02/02/2015
BSDTalk 250: WhatsApp
There’s two important numbers in this new, nearly-an-hour-long BSDTalk: Half a million billion, which are the number of people using FreeBSD via WhatsApp, and 250, which is the number of BSDTalk episodes so far. That’s a great milestone for BSDTalk. Oh, and the recording is from MeetBSD 2014, with Rick Reed talking.
02/01/2015
Lazy Reading for 2015/02/01
Happy Groundhog Day!
- Early Copy Protection on the Apple ][. (via)
- If it Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It. I’ve linked to other stories on these computers before. (via)
- Never Trust a Corporation to do a Library’s job.
- A homebuilt MOS 6502 based microcomputer system. For those of you who thought the Hemingwrite link was interesting last week. Plus, is the 6502 the best chip ever for homebuilding? It sure crops up a lot. (via)
- The Untold Story Of The Invention Of The Game Cartridge. (via)
- “Pretty much everything AOL touches dies.” I link to it because I once worked for Time Warner.
- “Networking for Systems Administrators” is now available on Kindle.
- Long Live Grim Fandango. (via)
- The Queen of Code. (via)
- The Media Archaeology Lab. (via)
- Duckspeak Vs Smalltalk. I agree that there’s less tools available these days. (via)
- Do you like capacitors?
- tectur.io. Startup “inspiration”. (via)
Your unrelated video link of the week: The showreel of Nick Denboer, AKA Smearballs. (also via)
01/31/2015
In Other BSDs for 2015/01/31
I’m not sure how I ended up with so much BSD material this week, but hey, we all benefit!
- A user’s experience with OpenBSD as a desktop. (via)
- FreeBSD Jail Management Tools.
- nanoBSD for servers – part 1. (via)
- Sonicwall to pfSense?
- My first OpenBSD port. (via)
- Two new LibreSSL shirts, with cash going back to the project.
- What did Sony do to make FreeBSD awesome graphics wise with Playstation 4?
- pkgng and manual steps.
- long term support considered harmful
- The practical result of OpenBSD’s support policy. Rebuttal to previous link. (via)
- PC-BSD 10.1.1-RC2 now available.
- OpenBSD popularity vs Linux when talking about servers security (via)
- Concise, opinionated history of the BSD/SystemV split. (via)
- pfSense-2.2-RELEASE now available! I’ll be upgrading systems to that at work this weekend…
- SECURITY : OPENBSD VS FREEBSD. (via)
- Starting A Daemon via daemon(8) in FreeBSD.
- Thinkpad Carbon X1 2015 and OpenBSD, a review.
- Initial Zynq (Xilinx) support in NetBSD.
- glass tty fonts in NetBSD, mentioned here, seen here.
- portable cwm 5.6 is out.
- Assistance for the “too much RAM” delay problem.
- Slides for “OpenBSD: Redundant & Transparent Firewalls” (thanks Siju)
- A Comparative Introduction to FreeBSD for Linux Users. (via)
Your extended read: scaling linux-based router hardware recommendations, from the NANOG operators list. Follow the thread. It’s theoretically about Linux, but people name BSD solutions all through it. Hmm…
01/30/2015
DragonFly catchup
Here’s a number of DragonFly links to clear out my backlog:
- Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSH in DragonFly to version 6.7.
- He updated file, too.
- Bill Yuan’s ipfw branch has been updated.
- Matthew Dillon’s been making more Hammer2 commits; check the TODO for status.
- Michael Neumann has Rust working on DragonFly.
- Filesystem encryption on Hammer.
01/29/2015
BSDNow 074: That Sly MINIX
Episode 74 of BSDNow is up, with some interesting stories of Linux users switching to BSD, and an interview of Andrew Tanenbaum of MINIX fame.
01/28/2015
NFS and alc(4) improvements
If you have very recent alc(4) hardware, it may be supported now. If you are booting over NFS, it may be faster now. These changes are unrelated other than both being recent – NFS is improved for any chipset.
01/27/2015
powerd refinements for DragonFly
powerd now can be adjusted on DragonFly, for quicker returns to high CPU frequencies, or slower … slowdowns? It’s quickly quick or slowly slow. That’s not the best explanation, but I like rhymes. For a less stupid description, look at the man page, which now includes usage examples.
01/26/2015
i915 improvements to test
Francois Tigeot has updated the drm/i915 code again, matching Linux 3.10 for feature level… but it’s a big update. If you are
- Running DragonFly-master
- Using a i915 chipset
- (optional) On a chipset that is not Haswell or Ivy Bridge
… He could use your testing and feedback.
A DragonFly laptop for me
I’m saving up for one of those Acer c720p Chromebooks that people seem to be enjoying. If you have enjoyed the Digest for a long time and want to help, please do. Of course it’s to run DragonFly.
Thanks to the generosity of a bunch of people, I’ll get a C720 and an SSD too. Thank you all very much, people I have never met but would like to shake the hands of.
01/25/2015
Lazy Reading for 2015/01/25
All over the spectrum this week.
- The Story of the Intel 4004. (via)
- Why Perl Didn’t Win. Some methods that could be useful for the BSDs here. (via)
- uBlock, a less-resource-intensive version of AdBlock. (via joris on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Emacs user at work. (via alexh on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Librem 15, “A Free/Libre Software Laptop”. Blobless. (via Mike)
- How to cheat at the future. Something I need to address for this very Digest. (via)
- What does {some strange unix command name} stand for? (via)
- Your entire PC in a mouse. (via)
- So I bought a mechanical keyboard.
- Emacs is my new window manager. (via)
- m-x start-them-early.
- Slackbot bot. (via)
- List of Good Free Programming and Data Resources. (via)
- Open Hardware Random Number Generator. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- The Hemingwrite. Looks like a TRS-80. (via)
- The Emularity.
Your unrelated link of the week: Skymall, 2007.
01/24/2015
In Other BSDs for 2014/01/24
Short week this week, mostly due to a lack of interesting source changes.
- Learn Unix the Hard Way. Actually OpenBSD and nothing except a table of contents yet. (via)
- How not to upgrade your systems.
- Linux vs. BSD: which should you use? Nothing new discovered here. (via)
- PC-BSD 10.1.1-RC1 Now Available.
- Some upcoming BSD-related books from Michael Lucas.
- NYCBUG events for January and February.
- Extracting pkgsrc packages without packages. (saves time with NFS)
- FreeBSD and Vagrant. (via nycbug-talk mailing list)
- Make PC-BSD work like Windows.
- Lumina 0.8.1 is out.
- urndis(4) is how you tether OpenBSD to a phone; or use it as a hotspot.
- There’s a BSD meetup happening February 19th in Hannover, Germany.
01/23/2015
DragonFly and LGA1150
Matthew Dillon purchased some Haswell-based motherboards, and documented his hardware setup, for anyone who is looking to build a decent, new DragonFly system.
DragonFly 4.0.3 images available
ISO/IMG files for DragonFly 4.0.3 have been uploaded and by now should be available on your favorite mirror. You should update for the OpenSSL upgrade. If you already have DragonFly 4.0.x installed, the normal ‘make buildworld && make buildkernel && make installkernel && make installworld && make upgrade’ cycle should work just fine.
01/22/2015
BSDNow 073: Pipe Dreams
It’s Thursday, and that means a new BSDNow episode. The interview is with David Maxwell, who gave a talk about Unix pipelines at MeetBSD 2014. There’s the usual amount of discussion of recent topics, too, and I see they have a new sponsor.
DragonFly 4.0.3 out
DragonFly 4.0.3 has been tagged; you can look at the tagging message for details, but the major reason for doing so is to include OpenSSL-1.0.1l. I will have images up soon.
01/21/2015
Slider, Hammer, and how to
John Marino has written up an extensive how-to for slider, the history tool for Hammer filesystems, including screenshots.
The mixer remembers
Thanks to Sascha Wildner porting from FreeBSD, mixer(8) now remembers state. This is something I’ve wanted for a long time.
01/20/2015
Don’t forget moused
For whatever reason, I’ve seen several people in the last week or so have mouse problems on install, and they were often solved by running moused. So, there’s your little reminder.
Glasgow OpenBSD presentation
Normally I’d hold this off until the In Other BSDs item on Saturday, but by then it will be too late: There’s a “Building redundant and transparent firewalls with OpenBSD” presentation happening at the Scottish Linux User’s Group meeting, Thursday night in Glasgow, Scotland.
01/19/2015
Book review: FreeBSD Essentials: Storage Mastery
Normally if I talk about a filesystem here, I talk about Hammer, which is not a surprise. However, I often read and review Michael W. Lucas’s BSD-oriented books, and he has written FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials. I’m reviewing it here because it’s obviously BSD-related, and some portions are directly relevant for other BSDs.
Disk setup and layout isn’t something that normally consumes much attention past the initial install – until something goes wrong, or until a system needs a new configuration. Installers tend to hide that initial layout, anyway.
Vendors take advantage of this. Much of the specialized storage vendors out there are selling you a computer with disks in it – something you can build yourself. You don’t (or at least I hope you don’t) buy a firewall when you can do the same with pf or ipfw; the same goes for disk management.
There’s plenty of coverage of GEOM, GELI, GDBE, and the other technologies specific to FreeBSD. I for one did not know how GEOM worked, with its consumer/producer model – and I imagine it’s complex to dive into when you’ve got a broken machine next to you. If you are administering FreeBSD systems, especially ones that deal with dedicated storage, you will find this useful. He doesn’t go into ZFS, but he does hint at a book on it later…
If you’re not a FreeBSD user, there’s also material that’s common to any BSD – an explanation of disk architecture, of UFS, RAID, and SMART. Knowing what SMART is and does is essential, in my opinion. You may be able to cobble this material together from other sources online, but it’s packaged nicely here, with Lucas’s easy writing style.
It’s a self-published book, and as such the download nets you three different formats. It’s currently $10 and DRM-free, directly from the author. You can also order physical versions, if you like paper.
01/18/2015
Lazy Reading for 2015/01/18
Not sure how I ended up with so many interesting conference links. There’s some substantial reading here too, so clear your schedule.
- A long-overdue update of the Cluetrain Manifesto. (via)
- AWS Tips I Wish I’d Known Before I Started. (via)
- Secure Secure Shell. (via)
- Hacking a Gameboy with a speedrun bot to program new games. It’s hard to wrap my brain around. (via)
- Operating System development in Rust.
- Speaking of which, Rust just reached 1.0A. (via)
- Improving your PuTTY connections.
- The Intel Compute stick looks fun.
- RIPE70 is in Amsterdam in March; the Call for Papers is out.
- NANOG 63 is in Texas at the start of February; registration and the agenda are up.
- Vintage Computer Fest East 10 is in April in New Jersey. It’s hands-on – you get to run the old computers! (via)
- CiE 2015, a cross-disciple conference in late June in Bucharest, also may interest you. (via)
- The Millennial Literalist.
- Robots are starting to break the law and nobody knows what to do about it. (via)
- Event Notify Test Runner, or entr. Runs arbitrary commands when a file changes. It was also talked about at the NYCBUG meeting that just happened.
- Moving Beyond TCP/IP.
- This program is the equivalent of ENIAC. Really! They’re both for calculating ballistics. (also via)
- The Tears of Donald Knuth. (via multiple places)
- When The Sky Is Falling. DDOS mitigation, in slides. (via)
- The Morris Worm, as a physical artifact.
01/17/2015
In Other BSDs for 2015/01/17
Lots of material this week.
- New Update GUI for PC-BSD / Automatic Updates.
- Lumina Desktop 0.8.0 Released.
- (side note) I see these PC-BSD items in src updates, but these published summaries are so complete it’s better to wait and post them instead. Other software orgs, take note.
- A week of pkgsrc, #6.
- Making the switch.
- Configuring X forwarding between BSD and Windows. (via)
- The 4th quarter 2014 FreeBSD report is out.
- Digital Ocean now supports FreeBSD.
- Using TrueOS as a IPFW based home router.
- Be your own VPN provider with OpenBSD. (via)
- pfSense University classes are available online.
- Jetpack, a FreeBSD-based app container, i.e. Docker, etc. (via)
- No more install floppies for NetBSD, at least on amd64.
- OpenBSD adds binary patching, at least on amd64.
- Lid suspension is now on by default in OpenBSD.
- OpenBSD on an Intel Galileo.
- Security: OpenBSD vs FreeBSD. (via)
- FreeBSD added Data Center TCP (DCTCP).
- FreeBSD’s new page clustering strategy.
- FreeBSD has a new MINIMAL kernel config.
- FreeBSD has multiboot support for Xen Dom0.
- Yay, cross-pollination!
01/16/2015
Google Compute Engine and DragonFly?
Can someone with experience on Google Compute Engine try out running DragonFly on it? There’s FreeBSD instructions, so it might work.
Which wireless cards for DragonFly?
The short answer is ath(4) and iwn(4), via this post. There’s an update coming for the wireless infrastructure in DragonFly; Matthew Dillon and Adrian Chadd (on the FreeBSD side) are working together for improvements.
While I’m mentioning recommendations, the Silicon Image 3132 chipset is apparently excellent for eSATA drives on DragonFly.
01/15/2015
BSDNow 072: Common *Sense Approach
As promised last week, the BSDNow show has an interview with Jos Schellevis of OPNSense, along with the normal array of stories and links.
01/14/2015
sshlockout in DragonFly
Matthew Dillon’s added a sshlockout utility, to temporarily block SSH traffic from repeated brute force SSH login attempts. It’s been mentioned before, but it’s in the system now. It’s been refashioned to work with pf.
01/13/2015
Major DragonFly sound update
Francois Tigeot has performed a major upgrade of DragonFly’s sound system. If you had sound problems or unsupported hardware before, this may fix them. It will require a full buildworld+buildkernel.
01/12/2015
More DragonFly/Chromebook tricks
Romick posted some more tips on setting up various special keys on an Acer c720 Chromebook, running DragonFly of course, and Matthew Dillon also has backlight key configuration. I wish I had a spare $200 right now for one of these.
BSDNow 071: System Disaster
I managed to miss this last week because of issues with my RSS feeds, but the 71st episode of BSDNow is/has been up. It’s “systemd isaster”, cause the interview is with Ian Sutton talking about BSD replacements for systemd dependencies. There’s a number of at-least-slightly DragonFly-related things in there, including OPNSense, pkgng, and Hammer mentions.
01/11/2015
Lazy Reading for 2015/01/11
Historical links are the accidental theme this week.
- RFC Reader. For those uncomfortable with plaintext? (via)
- The truth about C & Unix history. An oldie but goodie. (via)
- After several decades, there’s still no standard for querying registration data, surprisingly. There’s something coming together, though.
- Plan-55A, store and forward messaging – on paper. (via)
- 1980s sci-fi show openings. No fancy House of Hobbit Thrones catering to nerds back then… this was as good as it got. (via)
- Who named Silicon Valley? (via)
- Unix people cards. (via)
- Big Boring System, a text only online community, and another sort of throwback like tilde.club. (via)
- The Cryptographic Doom Principle. A clear explanation. (via)
- TL;DR-ify, a One Thing Well item. Happens to contain a paragraph-sized 40-year history of hypertext on the bottom of that page.
- Ping stories. I’ve linked to other versions before. (via)
- The history of grep. (via)
- The little book about OS development. (via)
- Decentralize All the Things! (via)
- That previous link took me to Gary Bernhardt’s Twitter feed, where I saw this pun. Also this truth.
- His site is destroyallsoftware.com. I like the ‘screencasts’ idea; much easier to watch than some person in a room staring into a camera.
- Also also found through that link: Sandstorm, a personal server setup. My initial impression is that it’s similar to Owncloud. I wish more people did this.
- Also also also: from Justin Cormack through Twitter: Unhosted.
01/10/2015
In Other BSDs for 2015/01/10
I got this done early, for once.
- Dissecting OpenBSD’s divert(4). (via)
- Running ownCloud with httpd on OpenBSD (via)
- OpenBSD 2014 by the numbers. (via)
- Code rot & OpenBSD. Many comments at the original link. (via)
- Accessing radio hardware switches in NetBSD.
- What does this Etherswitch framework do?
- FreeBSD now has Elf Tool Chain utilities, which appears to be BSD-licensed versions of binutils; possibly more?
- FreeBSD is now on Gnome 3.
- BSDCan 2015’s Call For Papers is out.
- NYCBUG is meeting January 13th at a new location for “Designing Versatile Unix Utilities“, presented by Eric Radman.
- There’s a new BSD user group in the Albany, NY area.
- BSD Magazine for December 2014 is out. (via)
4.0.2 images up
I’m breaking my normal weekend posting schedule to note that DragonFly 4.0.2 images are now linked on the main site and on mirrors now/soon.
01/08/2015
DragonFly 4.0.2 released
DragonFly 4.0.2 has been tagged. I’m building the release images now. If you’re already running 4.0.1 it’ll be easy enough to upgrade to; you will want to catch up to this commit fixing a quiet memory issue.
01/07/2015
Multiple disk speedup
The CAM layer in DragonFly has had its big lock removed/been marked MPSAFE, so you will notice a performance increase when using multiple disks. (assuming you aren’t throughput-limited, of course.)
DragonFly on a VPS
That’s Virtual Private Server, if you don’t know the term. I mentioned VPSs and BSD before in a In Other BSDs article, but “Ed” found an article specifically about installing DragonFly on Vultr.
01/06/2015
ZFS and Hammer conversation
There’s a FreeBSD Forums thread about ZFS and Hammer, as several people have pointed out to me. It’s interesting to see, but there isn’t a lot of quantitative discussion. (It’s a forum post, not a white paper, though.)
Library building with DragonFly
Do you remember the BSDNow story a while ago about a Tanzanian community effort using FreeBSD to build a library? They’re looking at DragonFly, too, because of the low resource requirements. From that discussion: a hardware reason for an ‘indefinite wait buffer’ error, and a note on how to most efficiently download packages for multiple machines.
01/05/2015
V4-mapped addresses out, TCP MTU discovery in
Sepherosa Ziehau has posted a note that V4-mapped addressing is no longer supported in DragonFly. You will need to do a full buildworld/buildkernel if you are running master. Also, TCP MTU path discovery is on by default. Also also, he’s added a SOL_SOCKET/SO_CPUINT socket option for use to reduce load in heavy network activity. As usual, I don’t quite comprehend.
Backlights, improvements for your i915
You can now control your backlight settings through sysctl and enjoy greater video support/stability – as long as you are using a i915 video chipset on DragonFly.
01/04/2015
Lazy Reading for 2015/01/04
My end of year vacation is over tomorrow, darnit.
- My $2375 Amazon EC2 Mistake.
- The Old New Thing 2014 link clearance.
- This sentence proves it is The Future.
- Another hidden computer/exposure surface. (via)
- Preserving arcade games. (via)
- The Retro-Computing Society of Rhode Island. (via)
- The Internet version of ‘empty calories‘. (via)
- Quake on an oscilloscope: A technical report. (via)
- From Gongkai to open source. I don’t totally agree, but it’s compelling.
- Virtualizing an operating system to run a text editor. (via)
- On the curl | sh pattern. (via)
- geektyper.com. A modern ‘boss key’. (via)
- A Microsoft-centric developer switches into open source. (via)
- Why aren’t we using SSH for everything? (via)
01/03/2015
In Other BSDs for 2015/01/03
Remembered to do this all at the last minute, after I got the new server up.
- LibertyBSD, an OpenBSD fork with no non-free firmware.
- OPNSense, a FreeBSD-based firewall that is new to me.
- OpenBSD projects that aren’t OpenBSD.
- Broken build tracker for pkgsrc. (via)
- pkgsrc-2014Q4 is out.
- pkgviews is gone from pkgsrc.
- NetBSD can now record MIDI files from /dev/music.
- How to see hidden pf tables.
- The OpenBSD Foundation met their fundraising goal for 2014.
- Typing in Japanese in OpenBSD. (via)
- Tor relay issues on OpenBSD, in two slightly munged threads.
- OpenBSD and syslog, over TCP.
- FreeBSD has updated to Unbound 1.5.1 and clang/llvm/lldb to 3.5.0.
- bhyve on FreeBSD has an improved Real Time Clock.
- GNU texinfo is out of FreeBSD.
- FreeBSD’s asr(4) driver is gone too.
- pcc 1.1.0 was recently released. (via)
01/02/2015
Site back to normal
I’m moved over to new hardware for the Digest. Tell me if you see issues, please.
01/01/2015
BSDNow 070: Daemons in the North
The BSDNow people aren’t slowing down for the holidays, as there’s another episode this week. The interview is with Dan Langille, about the 2015 BSDCan conference. He’s also the person behind freebsddiary.org, which served as partial inspiration for the Digest. There’s also more video presentation links, news items, and so on.
Site downtime
shiningsilence.com/dragonflydigest.com will be going down for a brief period in the next 24 hours, for a hardware upgrade.
12/30/2014
Slider, for Hammer
John Marino has created something very useful: a graphical tool for Hammer file history. It’s called ‘Slider’, and it uses curses to work in a terminal. It shows historic versions of files and can restore those old versions as needed. This was already possible in Hammer, of course, but it required a sequence of commands that were not straight-forward. I’ve been slow enough posting it that version 2.0 is already out, offering a way to see files that no longer exist, but are still in history. (i.e. deleted some time ago) ‘Time Machine’ sounds like the best name, but that seems to be taken.
12/29/2014
Book Review: The Book of PF, 3rd edition
I’m going to dive right in with an anecdote: As is normal for anyone in systems administration, I’m busy at work. I’ve been short an employee for some time, and I brought in a managed service provider to do some work. This included a revamping of the network equipment and layout, as it has been growing organically rather than in a planned fashion.
I received the formal assessment from the provider a few weeks ago, and it mentioned that we were using a non ICSA-certified firewall: pf, in the form of pfSense. This was accompanied by some rather drastic warnings about how open source was targeted by hackers! and implied that ICSA certification was a mark of quality rather than a purchasable certification. All bogus, of course.
The reason I’m starting this review with this little story is to note that while open source has become well-accepted for system and application software, there’s still a lot of people that expect commercial hardware to be exclusively handling data once it leaves the server. That’s been valid for a long time, but software like pf represents a realistic option, or even an improvement, over many commercial and proprietary options. Since pf exists in one form or another on all the BSDs, it’s a tool you should be at least somewhat familiar with.
Peter N. M. Hansteen has written about pf first online, and then in printed form, for some time. The Book of PF is in its third edition, and that’s what I have to read. (Disclosure: No Starch Press gave me the book free, without requirements)
The book is excellent, and easier to read than I expected for a book about network processing. It can be read in linear form, as it takes the reader from simple to more complex network layouts. It works as a reference book, too, as it focuses on different tools around pf and what they are used for.
It covers the different pf version in OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD, and DragonFly gets at least a partial mention in some portions of the book. For example, OpenBSD recently removed ALTQ, but the other BSDs still use it. With- and without-ALTQ scenarios are covered every place it applies. You’re going to get the most mileage out of an OpenBSD setup with it, though.
The parts where the book shines are the later chapters; the descriptions of greylisting and spamd, the traffic shaping notes, and the information on monitoring pf will be useful for most anyone. It’s quite readable; similar in tone to Peter’s blog. If you enjoy his in-depth online articles, the book will be a pleasant read.
It’s available now from Amazon and directly from No Starch Press. It’s linked in the book slider currently running on the right side of this site, too.
12/28/2014
Lazy Reading for 2014/12/28
Last of the year!
- Glitches: A kind of history. (via)
- Speaking of glitches: Breaking Madden is still going.
- First Commits. (via)
- Your Friendly North Korean Network Observer. (via)
- The SoftSel Hot List for 1986.
- Steel Mill Hacked. How long until having operations disconnected from the Internet becomes a sign of quality for a business? (via)
- Rooms and Mazes: A Procedural Dungeon Generator. (via)
- The Infocom virtual machine, made
fleshsilicon. (via) - DOSBox in the browser. “…watching a miracle with every boot.” (via)
- Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty (via)
- The Future: A Cat Litter Box and DRM. “Internet of Things you can’t own”. (via multiple places)
- When Security Goes Right. This is how problems should be handled.
- Images of Math, a tumblr. (via)
- Two eras of the Internet: pull and push. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: UpDog, a revolutionary communications platform. (via)
